State Sponsored IE Vulnerability and a 4 Line MySQL Exploit

Some interesting news has come out in the last week about two serious Internet Explorer vulnerabilities and a MySql vulnerability that can be exploited by a four line exploit!

IE VULNERABILITES

Of the two latest Microsoft IE vulnerabilities, CVE-2012-1889 and CVE-2012-1875, the first seems the most interesting. Rumored to be “State-Sponsored” the vulnerability seems to focus on users using Gmail, MS Office and Internet Explorer. And as yet is still an active Zero Day exploit. Security software company Rapid 7 explains the vulnerability as follows:

“This is an uninitialized memory bug found in MSXML. According to Microsoft, such a component can be loaded from either Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office. This vulnerability is rumored to be “state-sponsored”, and what makes it really critical is it’s still an 0-day hijacking Gmail accounts. That’s right, that means if you’re using Gmail as well as Internet Explorer or Microsoft Office, you’re at risk. We expect this vulnerability to grow even more dangerous since there’s no patch, and it’s rather easy to trigger.”

The second IE exploit has been patched, but as yet there is no patch for CVE-2012-1889. Microsoft does offer a “FixIt” program as a work around until an official patch is released.

Rapid 7, the creative geniuses behind Metasploit, have already released exploit modules for both IE vulnerabilities so you can test your systems to see if they are vulnerable to the attack.

MySQL VULNERABILITY

Earlier this month, an advisory about a serious vulnerability in MySQL and MariaDB was released. According to a post on Seclists.org a situation exists where an attacker may be able to trick MySQL in allowing you to log in without a password by repeating log in attempts:

“When a user connects to MariaDB/MySQL, a token (SHA over a password and a random scramble string) is calculated and compared with the expected value. Because of incorrect casting, it might’ve happened that the token and the expected value were considered equal, even if the memcmp() returned a non-zero value. In this case MySQL/MariaDB would think that the password is correct, even while it is not. Because the protocol uses random strings, the probability of hitting this bug is about 1/256.

Which means, if one knows a user name to connect (and “root” almost always exists), she can connect using *any* password by repeating connection attempts. ~300 attempts takes only a fraction of second, so basically account password protection is as good as nonexistent.”

Security Expert David Kennedy (aka ReL1K) has released a four line Python exploit script to test for the vulnerability. Other sites say that the vulnerability can be written in a single shell line! Metasploit has released a module that uses the Authentication Bypass to dump usernames and password hashes from the MySQL server.

Fortunately only certain versions of MySQL and MariaDB are vulnerable. Check the security advisory for more information.